About Me

I draw from a rich wealth of experience in retail, manufacturing, sales, education, and association leadership and management.
I'm the author of ten leadership, career, and business development books, a mini-book series and several ebooks in process.
Visit: http://www.SuccessPublications.biz for more information on the writing or
http://www.bobhooey.com on the services I provide my clients.
Visit my main site: http//www.ideaman.net or
http://www.fullofhooey.com for more information on what I can do to help you or your organization move to the next level.

Wednesday, May 17, 2006

reveries magazine

Steve Jobs personally 'ordered workers to replace the metal bolts holding together the glass panels that make up the cube over the companys' new 'subterranean store that sprawls beneath the plaza in front of the General Motors Building, just across from Central Park,' reports Nick Wingfield in The Wall Street Journal. Explains Steve: 'We spent a lot of time designing the store and it deserves to be build perfectly.' And different of course. The entrance of the latest Apple store its 147th 'in keeping with Mr. Jobs's penchant for eye-catching designs' recalls 'I.M. Pei's glass pyramid at the entrance of the Louvre museum in Paris all that will be visible from the street is the entrance surrounded by a roughly three-story-high glass cube jutting from the ground.'The store's location is also killer, set as it is 'in one of the most highly trafficked tourist and retail corridors in the world.' Says analyst Charlie Wolf of Needham & Company: 'It really is the center of gravity of Fifth Avenue.' Charlie also fully expects the store to continue to fuel Apple's retail juggernaut. 'The numbers have been just astonishing in terms of the traditional retail numbers we look at,' he says. Indeed: 'Revenue from the Apple stores was $2.35 billion in fiscal 2005, ended Sept. 24, or 17 percent of Apple's total sales, up from $621 million in fiscal 2003.' Which is up from zero in 2001, when the first Apple stores opened. We wrote about that launch in Cool News exactly five years ago yesterday (read that story here), when the prevailing opinion among analysts was that Apple was about to be cored.Never underestimate the power of really smart retail! These days, most analysts fall all over themselves to praise the wisdom of Apple's retail strategy, which was developed "because other retailers weren't doing an effective job of showcasing its Macintosh computers." It hired ex-Target exec Ron Johnson, who created the stores as "hip, visually memorable shopping destinations." There are the big ideas (like the genius bar, "where technical experts help customers fix problems") and the elegant ideas (like "using large open tables to display products, rather than cluttering them on store shelves.") "It's not like a regular store," says William Mon, a devotee.